Return to School

It's still the official school holidays but we were told to come to school to continue our projects. So we are starting school 1 month early.

The first week was slow. My group members were overseas, so the rest of us just played games and talked until our briefing on Thursday, 22nd September. That week I did 2 poster designs just to have more variety of posters in the environment.

This week, we got to see our supervisors, Philip and Borko. Philip looked through the animatic and designs and gave us some suggestions about it. One big concern was the design of the office building, as the design and colours made it stand out a lot. We do want it to stand out, but it did not look like an office building. Philip says the colours make it look like a casino or a place of entertainment. So I was tasked to redesign the building but to try to keep the shape similar to the current one. I only completed one sketch.

I was also trying out Toon shader on the buildings to make it look flat. I have completed converting 2 buildings to the Toon shader, so there is 2 more left to go.

I think that is all that has happened. I feel that we might be doing things slowly as we still know in the back of our minds that it's still the holidays. There is no pressure to do things. But things are catching up as the weeks go by. So that's good!

Week 16, 1 More Week left!

Most of this week was spent finishing assigments for week 17. The only thing i managed to do for CPD was the final script which is only 75% done. I am going to finish that tonight:)

I was still quite blur about how to do the research for the production bible, but I have asked my group about it and they cleared my doubts. All i have to do now is find time to actually finish it!

Haha! I dont know why i put this here but it made me happy. I guess I am excited that there is only 1 week left and then there is our Last Viva and then we are done!!!!!!!!!!! Yaaaay

Also the 4 of them are the 4 of us in 4ARC. I am Brick, of course at extreme right(i love lamp). Roxann is Ron, the one in blue, the leader. Charmaine is Brian, extreme left and Alvin is Champ.

Week 15: Acceptance

I started on the production bible this week. I just wrote down the stuff that we already know such as the premise, log line and other things about our story. But the hard part is collecting research about marketing and our competitors. So I have not touched that part yet. I have been really busy with other modules that I could not find time to do much CPD. I even used my CPD time to do other work as this week was my last IS modules lessons. So i had to prepare for a final presentation and prepare for a practical test. On top of that i had to put in hours at the gym for my fitness module. So a lot of time went to IS modules this week. I feel really bad as this week especially I probably did the least work out of all of us. Alvin was working on the new character designs, expressions and poses. Roxann and Charmaine was working on the colour script, and I literally wrote down 2 pages of words on a document.

Just to feel like i actually did more things, here is something i did 5 weeks ago that i did not post:

That's it. This is supposed to be a card. An alpha card to be scattered around in the background of the exterior. So it will be blurred a bit and I will make more versions by duplicating, changing height and width and changing the colours. And I predict that next week would not be productive for CPD as well as I have to finish all my assignments for week 17. 

These are the list of tasks that i'm assigned to:

• Finishing the first 4 chapters of the Production Bible
• Finish updating the prop designs and do the Props guide
• Edit Audio for the Animatic
• Make different versions of the Building Alpha Cards

I will try my best to start these things next week. As for the group's progress I feel like we are doing alright. Oh and we decided to finish the slides earlier and have a rehearsal a few days before the presentation as our previous presentations have been very unprofessional. 

Week 14:

Hey there! This week we had to start focusing on preparing for our final VIVA. Our storyline has been confirmed which is really good but Roxann and Alvin are planning to change some of the camera angle for some shots as they thought some were not interesting enough.

After looking at the exterior environment again, Charmaine and I felt that the building that i had modelled look out of place amongst the other buildings. So we drew some sketches trying to incorporate some of the designs of the other buildings into my building. We noticed that all the other buildings had ridges that my building did not. So I modelled a new version of my building. I UV mapped it but have not textured it as my laptop's graphic card is messed up and the colour saturation is very different from Charmaine's buildings. So i will probably texture it on the school computer and also get the right colours.

It looks quite different from the original model..... but at least it fits in better :) the frame at the right side is empty as there is going to be a poster in it. That's why there is a hole there now. 

Also my group is starting to do colour scripts which i did not really help in that as I am not good with colours but i also felt that I was not contributing much which is probably true. There was quite a few Whats app conversation in the 4arc group that i did not take part in as i was doing other work. But my IS modules are going to finish on Friday, week 15. Then i have my Fridays free for like 3 weeks. So i felt really useless. The only way i can match the level of work they are doing is by doing more admin work. Which works as I am doing the first 4 chapters of the Production Bible. I also have to clean up the props and do the props guide which is easy. And also do sound editing. I hope that we can finish in time. We have only 2 more weeks until Week 18 and we have not started on our Proof Of Concept.

Oh well....

Week 13: Bargaining

Prologue

viva....why you do this to us.....

Chapter 1: The Night Before

Surprise surprise, I stayed up all night again. But i didn't need to as I only stayed up to compile all the storyboards onto the slides. My OCD got the better of me trying to make the storyboards as neat and uniformed as possible. Hence, no sleep for me. But it was my own fault.

Chapter 2: The Morning Of

Charmaine and I were coming to school at 7.45am to combine our exterior meshes and render some still frames of the environment. Charmaine worries that we were not going to finish in time but I was calm. When you don't get the right amount of sleep, everything seems alright. But we managed to add the renders to the slides just in time. It looked decent.

Chapter 3: Viva

I was the first one to enter the Dailies room. Karen and Phil were already there. I call Charmaine to come to the Dailies room. She arrives. We prepare the slides trying to buy time for Roxann and Alvin. When they don't show up, Karen asks us to start without them. 1 minute into it, Roxann enters the room. Then it's time to show the animatic. It is with Alvin. So we show the most current one we have which has all the current changes. The Animatic ends. Roxann presents our story's characters. Alvin walks in. Needless to say, we were screwed from the start.

Chapter 4: Aftermath

At around 5.30pm, I was sitting at the lift area with Megan and Zhi Fang. Karen and Phil walked out of the A3DA doors and told us that they were pleased at the progress of all the groups. I thought they were trolling us. And then I went home. 

Epilogue

Overall, I felt that we had done a lot. Even though we had quite some more to do for the Final Viva. I am happy at where the story is at. We used to always question the story but now we hardly even think about or want to change it. Now we can focus on colour scripts and the feel and look of the story.

Acknowledgements

To the production manager, Roxann, who leads us fearlessly through this project and puts in a lot of time and effort to achieve great quality.

To the art director, Alvin, who does most of work and produces work with quality that none of us can ever achieve. 

To the 3D Supervisor Charmaine, who does a ton of quality work in a short time and still manages to have a respectable social life.

This will be my first and only 'story book' post that i write.

Good day to you

Week 12: Anger

Since we added new scenes to our story, we had to reshoot those scenes for the live action. Some of those moments were the funniest moments we had during CPD.

Viva is tomorrow!!! And we are the first group to present! Charmaine and I had started to model the interiors but we knew there was not enough time to render them. I do not think it is good that we still cannot decide whether we want bumps on the buildings or not. We are always going back and forth.

So i modelled the interior of Stanley's house and the lift interior.

Lift Interior Door

Lift Interior

Stanley's House Interior.
We only need this section of the house as it's the only part that is going to be seen.

Of course Charmaine modelled the office interior and all the props in it, thankfully cause i probably would not have been able to finish it. Oh and the Restaurant building I modelled is not going to be used because the style of it does not match the other buildings.

In terms of the story, i feel like we have finally settled on a good idea. Of course there will be minor changes here and there but the groundwork has been laid and I am happy! I really hope that our presentation tomorrow will be good as the previous one went terribly.

Week 11: Denial

School has started.

I told myself when this semester started that i would not count down the weeks until the holidays because it makes me wait for the holidays and daydream about it. But i gave in and counted and now i am looking forwards to mid august more than ever. 

This week we submitted our 3EM Assignment which was our CPD street environment. But the environment was not completed as we still did not know whether we were going to add bumps and the rendering of colours was not finalised either. This week was tiring but we also had to model the interiors which was quite a lot. 

We were trying to fix our story as we were still not really satisfied with our animatic. Alvin had the idea of seeing Stanley's reflection and wanted it to be a recurring theme in the story and he did a version where Stanley would see his reflection in a cup of coffee. I thought it was a good idea. So all of us sat down and discussed a bit more and kind of wrapped up this new idea.

I feel like I have no time to focus on my other modules as CPD is taking up a lot of time. Because I'm slow. So i think next semester will be less depressing as we only have 1 other module other than FYP to focus on. 

Week 10 holiday? fuhgeddaboudit

Ayyyyyy!
You're back.
How nice to see you!
How was your holiday?
W-what's that? You didn't have one?
Oh you DID have a holiday but it didn't feel like it at all due to the copious amount of work?
Dang!
I wonder what that's like..............

So this week, we showed our animatics to some of our classmates, Zhi Fang and Bervyn, and they said that they did not understand what the message was. Zhi Fang knew what our story was about before they saw the animatic so she said that at the start of the animatic, what we were trying to show was clear but the second part of the animatic did not continue with the same message. So there was no focus. Bervyn did not know anything about our story prior to this and he said the same thing. All of us also agreed that we should try to focus more on one theme, which is either the discrimination in the society or the love story between Stanley and Ting Ting. So we stuck to the same characters and environments but we played around with the character developments and background and the flow of the story. In the end we got like a new and improved version of UNDERNEATH and I sent a long email to Karen explaining all the changes and the reason behind it.

But after all that we went back to the old story as Jim commented that our new story wasn't really a story but just a series of events and it took out all of the excitement that the old version had. So we filmed the live action reference video like the old animatic which was fun.

Some other things i modelled, rendered and textured:

School starts next week and I am not ready....

Week 9 HOLIDAY!!!!

Phase 1 has been successfully completed. Now to prepare for Phase 2. And by prepare, I mean eat chips and watch TV. Right off the bat, there were so many things to do. Charmaine and I had to start modelling, UV mapping and texturing the environments which included 4 buildings on a street, and trashcans and a dumpster as we were gonna hand this environment in for 3D Environment Modelling Module which is due in week 11.

Before we start to model however, we had to do the line work for the 3/4 view of all the buildings. That was my first task to complete.

I also started Modelling the Buildings I was in-charge of which is the building on the top right and left.

Fast Food Restaurant

Poster Building

Yep, this is what i did. It took a longer time to do the line art than the modelling itself. This is what I have done in 1 week. Yeah I know it's very minimal but come on! It's holiday! There is so much more work to do for CPD and I have not touched any homework for other modules. The previous term has been tiring and i think i'm losing steam. I feel like the drive that i had when this semester started is deteriorating. This is what happened last semester which resulted in me failing 2 of my modules. The only reason I am not as unmotivated as i was last year is because I have a group that expects me to produce work which I am grateful for. It forces me to focus and keeps me grounded. Although one of them can be annoying at some times.You know who I'm talking about. 

Anyways see yall next week. 

Week 7 & 8

I'm combining week 7 and 8's posts as i have not done much for CPD during this time. Exactly what i was afraid of. But because of assignments and common tests, the only thing i contributed to my team was the updated animatics, which i did the day before we had to show it to Karen. So i slept late because i was doing it. In the end, Karen did not see it. This is because i was in 3D Environment Modelling class while Roxann and Alvin were in CPD. So we agreed that i would compile the storyboards and put the file in the server for them to edit a bit and show to Karen. But i was using premiere pro and it is very troublesome when transferring files as the file will have to search for the images used and a lot of times our frames will be jumbled up. I could not use iMovie as i cannot update it. and iMovie is more user friendly especially for editing ametuers like us. So they had to compile the animatics from scratch during the CPD class. I feel bad as it wasted their time. But they managed to do finish it and show it to Karen. so thats good.

I initially took up the role of editor cause i felt that i was not really doing much in terms of aesthetics, so i wanted to edit as it is more technical. I was a bit upset that i had lost sleep to do work that did not get used, but then again it was a technical difficulty so i just had to brush it off. So from now on, any animatics will be done in Alvin's or Charmaine's laptop.

Today we started modelling our environment. I started on a building and it took so long to do as we did not have a clear reference of our buildings as they were all in front view. And we also did not gather any textures and research. So i have a new task of doing final line for the 3/4 view for all the buildings to be used as reference by Charmaine and I when modelling. Well that's all for now. See yall. You can probably sense the gloominess and tiredness behind this post. No memes, or dry, deadpan, sarcastic humour today. sorry not sorry. can't wait for 'holidays' to start. Once again, bye guys....

Yours truly,

....me

WEEK 6 VIVA

Welp. The first wave has come and gone. It was OK. Not good or great, but OK. I feel relieved that it is over and now I am focusing on finishing my assignments. I hope we do not take a really long break before we start as we have to finish modelling,texturing/colouring and lighting all the 3D assets(which is a lot).Plus we have to change our story and designs to add the suggestions that Karen gave us. What I did last week:

- finished colouring props turnaround
- did 2-tone shading for the storyboard
- put together the animatics

               *movie trailer voice*                     

This Is The Story Of How I Screwed Up.

I started doing 2-tone shading. Everything was going well and even Charmaine helped me to shade some thumbnails. If you read the group blog, you would know that we changed the shape of our character's heads halfway through doing the storyboards. So I reached home after doing the 2-toned shading. I was halfway done. My group then started a Skype call, and all was well until, Alvin told us that he already changed the storyboards and that he already changed the character designs in ALL the storyboards. And we were 2 tone shading the old storyboard. This says a lot about how blur I am and the "effective" communication in our group.

So i spent precious time, transferring the 2 tone layers individually into the new storyboard. And by the time I finished shading everything it was 0430. Our presentation was in 6 hours including travelling time which is one and a half hours.  Before I left home, I had put together 75% of the animatics which includes sound. I do not want to go into the embarrassing details of the sh*tstorm that happened until the presentation. But we ended up with an Animatic with no sound at all, the timing was off,  had repeating frames and went black for more than 10 seconds.

Despite all this, Karen gave us some helpful suggestions and said that we were somewhat on schedule to which we were all like wuuuut.......gurl you crazy...

Our next viva is not that far away, so i hope that we can work together better to stay on schedule so that we do not have to rush at the end. And I also want to be more responsible and not take too long to finish my tasks.

It feels like the workload we have to do and present in week 12 seems lesser than what we had to do for last week. But I also feel like I am wrong. So see you next week.

Week 5: I got stuffs done

My feelings last week:

  

(really artistic google images)

As you can see, last week was like every other week. Just kidding. But seriously, who does not feel like that every once in a while. 

We also had a talk by Lasalle, and a visit to Infinite Studio which was a nice change of pace.  Mr Freddie was cool, and he was honest about how the industry works. It opened my eyes to what my probable future would look like. I always worry about my future, whether i will be successful or not, what exactly do i want to do, will i like it, and then i remember that i have so much work to do NOW.  

*segue into the works i did*

When I am done with these, i have to help my group mates cause VIVA is this wed!! And holy moly we have A LOT to do. In addition to these drawings i also added all the assets for our CPD Shotgun page and assigned it accordingly. I feel that if we updated our shotgun earlier, we could have followed it and would not be rushing to finish work 2 days before our pitch. 

Also i hope that our VIVA goes well...

Lesson learnt: DO SHOTGUN EARLIER

See y'all next week. Also, I realise that most of my posts have been on Monday, so maybe I'll put up all my posts on Monday for regularity.

P.s. I didn't take a picture of my rubber band ball but who cares right?

Week 4 Update

This post is kind of late cause I spent quite some time, rendering the props to colour. Here it is:

These colours are not finalised, it was just to experiment a little bit. But the styles and designs were approved by Karen and my group, so I am starting the Turn-around. 

Only 1 week left before Week 6 VIVA!! I think our group is a little behind than most other groups, but all of us are about halfway through what we were assigned to do. So that is good.

However, we changed the head shape of the monsters as we felt that the original designs were not monster-like enough. But this will not push us back too far.

After the Viva, i hope that we do not have to change a lot of things, but who am i kidding. Haha! Of course there will be changes in our designs, environments, and story. But i saw one of our seniors blog and their end product was very different from what they pitched during Week 6 VIVA. So I am quite apprehensive that we will have to change our whole story.

Anyways see y'all next week!

P.s. I started a rubber band ball( I continue to do it only during breaks)

 

P.p.s. I kinda had some help from Megan....ok A lot of help.  :D

9th May :)

Today i did more variations of the props and I am starting to experiment with the colours for the props. Have not finished yet though.

As I am also the writer i completed the script.

It was a good thing that we had a 5 hour break in between classes

Timings

11.15am to 1.45pm - Props Variations

1.45pm to 2.25pm - Script writing

2.25pm to 3.00pm - Props colour

We still have a lot to do before Week 6 VIVA, and it is lucky that week 5 is whitespace so we can use that time to complete everything.

Week 3: Clarity

We finally 'confirmed' our story with Karen. But there was still a lot of work left to do.

I am in charge of props design and writing. 

These are the props designs i did. As we intend our films designs to be stylistic, our lines are not straight. They are slightly at an angle. I kind of feel that i cannot really contribute a lot to this project as I am repeating 1 module from last semester and i am also doing 2 IS modules this semester instead of next semester. Yup so I have 3 more classes than my other 3D arts classmates. So i feel bad that my other team mates are doing much more than I am. But they understand my situation and they help me even when I am too thick skinned to ask for help. Yeah! I have an awesome group :)

Week 2: Confusion

Last week was rough.... and it was only week 2! We met up almost everyday trying to finish our story. We have so many versions as after our first story was done, we pitched it to our teachers and then we changed it a lot of times after hearing their comments. For a while, we were not focusing on the right thing and that wasted time. It was lucky the teachers knocked some sense into us.

Its a public holiday today(Labour Day was yesterday) and we met up.....i should get used to this.

So as usual we changed the story again because last Friday, my brain decided to actually work and be smart. So when I looked through the story, I realised that if it was interpreted the wrong way, it was actually sending a very wrong message. The total opposite to what we wanted to express through our story. 

But on the other hand, we managed to create a new version in a day, which is slightly simpler and shorter and might have better character growth. My group mates are going to pitch this version to the teachers tomorrow to see if we are on the right path. But we all agreed that this is the final story unless there is something majorly wrong with it. 

So, so far so good! :)

FIRST POST!

Sup readers!

So, this is what happened during the holidays (March through 18th April):

- we discussed our story ideas

- designed a team logo

- chose 4 final story ideas

- wrote scripts for all and did character and environment designs

Dummies for my story

Environment Style Guide

Toilet Environment 

These are what I did + the scripts for all the stories








And this is what happened when school started in terms of CPD ( 18th April - present):

- we pitched our ideas

- received feedback for all the stories

- decided on one story

And this is what we are doing now:

- developing on the final story

- finding style guides and doing sketches

- asking feedback from teachers on Monday (25th April)

:)

I will be updating on the groups progress and my personal progress weekly(hopefully).

Be sure to check out Our Team's website and my group member's personal blogs below.

See ya next week!